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2.2 - Words become a process map

Now open the process map tool you trust and like and let's get started.

Btw. you will see colors in the process maps below. They seem to be random right now but they do follow a logic which will get clearer later on when we get more technical. For now, they just make the process maps look nicer ;).

We want to begin with something very simple we already discussed before:

a call comes in

it waits in a queue

it is connected to an agent

it ends

And that's how this process could look like:

You have a start and a finish event and two actions happening in between.

But as we already found out earlier, this is not quite what's going to happen, right? You never know if the call is really picked up. Also, you want to ensure your customer hears something while waiting, right?

This flow doesn't show much more than before, however, you have an extended sub-process (Everything happening while waiting) with two actions. Moreover, there is a decision point: is an agent available, at any point? If this equals true, the customer will connect to the agent and the call ends when the customer's request is hopefully solved. If the call is not picked up, it's an unending loop until an agent picks up.

You see, just the description of this process is bigger than the process map ;).

Now let's extend the whole thing:

It looks as if this process is much more complex but if you think about it, what has really changed from before? Two more things are happening:

Is the caller reaching your line within business hours?

Has the caller reached the maximum wait time?

In the first case, if the system returns a false, the customer will hear an audio prompt informing about the office hours and that they reached the service after hours.

In the second case, the system returns a true, meaning yes, in case the maximum wait time of the call has been reached. Just as in the case before, the caller is informed about the end of the call and maybe asked to call back later. The call terminates after the audio prompt.

The rest of the process is the same as above.

We hope this process map already gives you a first idea how you should design your own map. In the next section, we'll get much more elaborate, looking at more complex examples.